Built-in wardrobes

Built-in wardrobes are a fairly diverse product group. However, unlike their counterparts elsewhere in the house, the ones in the hallway are often open and wall-mounted.

This isn’t the case with Sudbrock’s 1977 classic ‘Panama’ built-in wardrobe. Composed of various modules such as open shelves, chests of drawers, mirror-door cupboards and more, this programme can be adapted into any desired configuration. ‘Nexus’, produced by the same manufacturer, already deviates from the strict definition of a built-in wardrobe, being a composition of a low storage sideboard, shelf and a hat rack with a coat rail, all affixed to the wall via a partially mirror-clad panel.

Flötotto’s ‘Profilsystem’ continues in this vein, creating an ensemble ideal for placing into a hallway niche, combining a closed cupboard, an open coat rack and hooks. Going even further, Mark Braun’s ‘Floor 95’ for Covo is a wall-mounted, serpentine steel tube that snakes its way across a wall, creating shelves and clothes rails in the process. Gerard Kerklaan’s and Maxime Szyf’s ‘Tubulus TW’ for van Esch is a simple rail, though it must be attached between two walls, and thus being a completely transparent and open, but also a real, built-in wardrobe.

Other designs in this category abandon this type. ‘S 1521’, a built-in wardrobe by Thonet, is a tubular steel, wall-mounted shelf, complete with a rail and hooks, carefully designed to answer to modern requirements, but still harmonising with the seminal, Bauhaus-designed furniture of the 1920s and 1930s. Charles and Ray Eames’s iconic ‘Hang it all’ from 1953 is a playful, a modular hook rail, which challenges modernism’s sober and serious image with its colourful, wooden spheres and non-orthogonal geometry of its steel wire structure.

It could also be argued that attaching a series of hooks onto a wall, such as Ivano Losa’s ‘Tac’ for Ak47, turns the wall itself into a large, open built-in wardrobe. Or maybe, in an act of whimsy, one might be tempted to go for Yuniic’s ‘trophäe coatrack’. Produced by Radius Design, this steel, wall-mounted wardrobe resembles a hunting trophy: coats and scarves are simply hung on its ‘antlers’.